Ithacating in Cornell Heights

As with the Hilton Canopy Hotel under construction just across the street, City Centre is in the middle of foundation work. Steel forms with plywood facing have been erected and braced along the perimeter of the building footprint. In fact, it looks like the project team is using the same Symons Steel-Ply system being deployed at the Canopy site. The piles have been driven and the foundation slab is poured. The team is slowly making their way to the steel frame of each pile, encasing it within forms before pouring the concrete, letting it cure, and then removing the forms to reveal a concrete/steel column ready for vertical additions. The elevator cores and stairwell columns are also on the rise. – the elevator core facing East State Street appears to be the furthest along.

We finally have a named general contractor, and like the architect for the City Centre team (Humphreys & Partners of Dallas), its a new entrant to the Ithaca area – Purcell Construction Corporation, with offices in Richmond, Virginia and Watertown, New York (an hour’s drive north of Syracuse). It appears that they have plenty of experience with multi-story towers and large structures, which is no doubt an asset for the project team.

As I previously said, as structural steel takes height here and with the Canopy and Harold’s Square, downtown Ithaca is going to look like one big advertisement for TCAD.